INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES

Stockholm Resilience Centre offers interdisciplinary courses on first (Undergraduate), second (Master's) and third (PhD) levels of University education. Want to know more about our courses? Click here!

POLICY and Practice

Our engagement in science-policy-practice activities has increased steadily over the years and range from high-level UN dialogues to local resilience assessments. Want to know more about our policy work? Click here!

The centre is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research, Mistra.

Our vision

We believe in the importance of reconnecting to the biosphere. We must stop considering nature as something separate from society because people and nature are truly intertwined in what we refer to as social-ecological systems. Development can no longer be done without an increased understanding of nature’s role for our own survival and well-being.

Our vision is a world where social-ecological systems are understood, governed and managed, to enhance human well-being and the capacity to deal with complexity and change, for the sustainable co-evolution of human civilizations with the biosphere.

In our globalized society, there are virtually no ecosystems that are not shaped by humans and no humans without the need for ecosystems and the services they provide. Our vision is a world where these interactions are understood, governed and managed.

Our science

All our work is rooted in the science we do. This means our long-term credibility will always be based on putting science first. Our research is based on innovative methodologies and extensive collaboration across disciplines and with society at large. Our work on everything from healthy and sustainable food to the greening of cities and financial markets has spurred new thinking on sustainability within science, policy and business. We have created a work environment that attracts researchers from around the world and we publish in high-impact scientific journals.

In 2016, a total of 150 scientific articles were published by SRC researchers, appearing in 84 different scientific journals. More than a third of the articles were published in high-impact journals such as Science, Nature, The Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

About 8 % of all our published articles belong in the top 1% of their academic fields, according to Thompson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators, a research analytics tool. Centre founder and science director Carl Folke was in 2016 named one of the world's most cited researchers.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre has emerged as a world leader in the conduct of interdisciplinary research on the dynamics of inter-connected social ecological systems. To have achieved this barely two years after its inauguration is a remarkable accomplishment indeed.

Our education programmes are considered among the best in Sweden. In 2013, the Swedish Higher Education Authority awarded our Master’s programme “Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development” its highest grade – “very high quality”. Among all 39 courses from 15 universities in the field of environmental sciences, only three received this rating. Of these three, only SRC's Master’s programme received the highest grade in all the sub-areas that were assessed.

The centre also currently employs more than 25 PhD students that form part of the SRC PhD programme. The aim is to produce future researchers who can expand knowledge to allow societies to understand and purposefully shape the biosphere for a sustainable future.

At the 2015 Paris Climate Summit (COP 21), centre director Johan Rockström opened the major “Action Day” climate event in front of 1200 delegates. Leading up to COP 21, Rockström also led the work writing the Earth Statement putting forward eight essential elements the international climate agreement should include. Over 100 political, faith and business leaders such as Paul Polman, Richard Branson, Winnie Byanyima, Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu signed the statement. The final agreement from Paris was considered a turning point for global emissions targets.

The Planetary Boundaries concept has, since its inception in 2009, become one of the most important frameworks for global sustainability thinking. Led by Johan Rockström, 28 internationally renowned scientists identified and quantified a set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Transgressing them substantially increases risks of crossing tipping points in the Earth’s climate and ecosystems leading to abrupt or irreversible changes. In 2011, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the global society to stand behind the science on planetary boundaries:

Help us defend the science that shows we are destabilizing our climate and stretching planetary boundaries to a perilous degree

SRC is the scientific partner to EAT, an international science-policy-business platform to reform the global food system. EAT is designed to bring together the stakeholders from the food industry to accelerate and scale up the work towards a more sustainable and healthy production and consumption of food.